Sawyer is a smart collaborative robot from Rethink Robotics, that is easy to program and has advanced features such as integrated vision and force feedback. Sawyer has redefined how robots are used in manufacturing around the world and offers a low cost, flexible automation solution to businesses.
This cobot can be used for machine tending, circuit board testing and other precise tasks; with its actuators, the cobot can feel its way into fixtures. Sawyer is perfect for tasks that other industrial robots are not capable of completing due to their large footprints and lack of mobility.
Sawyer is completely unique in the cobot world. Across its arm Sawyers has 7 degrees of freedom (mimicking the human arm), it is fully compliant and CE certified, and it has and embedded vision system with head and wrist cameras. Sawyer also boasts force feedback, adding to its safe use around humans, and is so easy to use that no programming knowledge is required due to the Intera software that it uses.
Sawyer is faster, lighter, stronger and more precise than its older sister, Baxter. Sawyer has been specifically designed to be able to operate and reach in smaller areas and can work side-by side with humans in these spaces. This 1260mm reach means Sawyer can be used for a whole variety of new applications and the 7 degrees of freedom in the arm mean that it can even reach into the tightest of spaces. Unlike its sibling, Sawyer has a smaller footprint of just 2 by 2 by 5 feet, only one arm, weighs 42lb, and has a heavier payload of 8.8lb.
Sawyer’s new embedded vision system includes a head camera for wide view applications. The Cognex camera in its wrist allows it to support many complicated vision tasks. These two cameras combined means that rapid re-deployment and dynamic re-orientation takes even less time, and with many more features constantly being added, Sawyer will only keep on improving.
Sawyer is incredibly adaptable- watch it work on different applications in different factories around the world.
Rethink Robtics’ Jim Lawton says the following characters make Sawyer stand out:
- It’s good at environments that change. “The robot positioning system coordinates frames, making it good at varied, unstructured environments,” said Lawton.
- It’s good at shifting from task to task. “You could have it do one thing one day, and then show it how to do something else the next day,” he says.
- Motion control, involving mechanical compliance and impedance controls, make it behave more like a human. “You don’t need to shift everything in the environment for the robot,” said Lawton.
At Active8 Robots we take these already impressive cobots and add on our personally developed end of arm tooling to further the possible uses of the robot and make more suitable solutions for manufacturing companies. To find out more about Sawyer and our unique solutions click here.
